U.S. stocks are drifting around their records on Thursday as technology stocks keep rising and as Wall Street keeps ignoring the shutdown of the U.S. government. The S&P 500 rose 0.1%, coming off its latest all-time high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 68 points, or 0.2%, as of 1:58 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.3% higher and hovering above its own record. Thursdays on Wall Street typically mean investors are reacting to the latest weekly tally of U.S. workers applying for unemployment benefits. But D.C.’s shutdown means this week’s report on jobless claims has been delayed. An even…
Author: Staff Writer
Napheesa Collier is more than just a WNBA star who is critical of her league and its leadership. The Minnesota Lynx player is a vice president of the players union, which means she will be sitting across from WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert at the negotiating table ahead of an Oct. 31 deadline to reach a new collective bargaining agreement. If that doesn’t cause enough tension, Collier is also a co-founder of Unrivaled, a three-on-three women’s basketball league that plays in the winter and features WNBA stars. That could give her additional leverage to try to press the WNBA as talks unfold. Here’s a look…
ChatGPT maker OpenAI’s value has soared to a sky-high $500 billion following a secondary sale of its shares held by current and former employees. Reuters reported Thursday that the group of employees unloaded around $6.6 billion in shares in the deal, pushing OpenAI’s valuation well north of its current valuation of $300 billion. During the secondary sale’s open window, OpenAI shareholders offloaded their stock to an investor group that included SoftBank, Thrive Capital, T. Rowe Price, Dragoneer Investment Group, and Emirati state-owned AI investment firm MGX, according to a source who described the deal’s details to Reuters. While $6.6 billion…
Picture a data center on the edge of a desert plateau. Inside, row after row of servers glow and buzz, moving air through vast cooling towers, consuming more electricity than the surrounding towns combined. This is not science fiction. It is the reality of the vast AI compute clusters, often described as “AI supercomputers” for their sheer scale, that train today’s most advanced models. Strictly speaking, these are not supercomputers in the classical sense. Traditional supercomputers are highly specialized machines designed for scientific simulations such as climate modeling, nuclear physics, or astrophysics, tuned for parallelized code across millions of cores.…
Pepsi has a new challenge: keeping products like Gatorade and Cheetos vivid and colorful without the artificial dyes that U.S. consumers are increasingly rejecting.PepsiCo, which also makes Doritos, Cap’n Crunch cereal, Funyuns and Mountain Dew, announced in April that it would accelerate a planned shift to using natural colors in its foods and beverages. Around 40% of its U.S. products now contain synthetic dyes, according to the company.But just as it took decades for artificial colors to seep into PepsiCo’s products, removing them is likely to be a multi-year process. The company said it’s still finding new ingredients, testing consumers’…
The federal government is expected to again accept new applications for a program that grants some people without legal immigration status the ability to live and work in the United States.Lawyers for the federal government and immigrant advocates have presented plans before a federal judge that would open the door again to accepting applications for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, otherwise known as DACA.One state — Texas, where the case is being heard — however, would be exempted from providing work permits.It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of people could be eligible to be enrolled in DACA, once a…
Despite being under a year old and having no revenue, Fermi America had a very successful initial public offering (IPO) this week. The company, which aims to provide data and power centers for artificial intelligence, saw its shares (Nasdaq: FRMI) close at $32.53 on their first day of trading Wednesday, up nearly 55% from their IPO price of $21 per share. Fermi’s stock price continued to rise through after-hours and into premarket trading on Thursday, reaching $36. It reached a high of $39 per share overnight, before dropping closer to $37 ahead of the market opening. What is Fermi? The…
It’s the dream: You finish a huge project that wins widespread acclaim—from your boss, your peers, your clients, your friends and family. You’re flying high. The world should be your oyster. And yet? You can’t find the inspiration to follow up. Your productivity dries up. You’re afraid lightning won’t strike twice. You fear being a one-hit wonder. Maybe not in the obsolete pop star sense—but in the professional, creative, successful sense. It’s a horrible, limiting feeling that kills your productivity, not to mention confidence. But according to research from the Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, there’s a cause for…
The White House website has been updated to blame the government shutdown that began Wednesday on Democrats. The official White House homepage was topped on Wednesday by a red, scrolling banner with the all-caps message “DEMOCRAT SHUTDOWN: DEMOCRATS’ [sic] IN THEIR OWN WORDS” along a countdown showing how long the shutdown has been going on. Users who clicked through were taken to a landing page with a livestreamed video of clips of Democratic lawmakers criticizing past shutdowns, integrating partisan messaging into its design. [Screenshot: WhiteHouse.gov] With a news ticker, countdown clock, and clips of politicians speaking on Capitol Hill, this…
Figma burst into the public eye in 2022 after Adobe was blocked from buying the design startup for $20 billion. This chapter set the stage for an even bigger milestone at Figma: a splashy IPO this summer at nearly double that valuation. Cofounder and CEO Dylan Field shares what distinguishes Figma from competitors, and why design is increasingly at the center of every industry in today’s software-driven economy. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features…